Paul Parker, who parlayed a career as a police officer into broader work in forensic pathology and civilian oversight of law enforcement, resigned Thursday as leader of the San Diego Commission on Police Practices, the monitoring board that hired him barely six months ago.
He was brought in to serve as executive director of the San Diego commission earlier this year, when city officials heralded him as the leader the long-stalled board needed.
Parker is also the former executive officer of the county Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board, the oversight body for the Sheriff’s Office and Probation Department. He quit that job in March, citing frustrations over slow progress and resistance to proposed reforms and policy recommendations.
The latest resignation was submitted to the city oversight board in a letter Thursday. His last day at the city will be Friday, Jan. 3, 2025.
“I appreciate having had the opportunity and am humbled by the trust you folks placed in me,” Parker wrote in his letter. “Unfortunately, over the past few months, it has become increasingly clear that I am not the right person for this position at this time.”
The departure is another setback for the city’s police oversight body, which has struggled to staff up both at the board level and in senior leadership since voters approved the commission four years ago.
Neither the San Diego Police Department nor the Mayor’s Office immediately responded to requests for comment Thursday afternoon.
In a brief interview after he submitted his resignation, Parker said the governance model adopted by the city made the job more difficult than he liked. The Commission on Police Practices has 25 members — a number he said “should be cut.”
“It is unwieldy,” he said. “A lot of people know how I feel. My hope is that as I meet with council members over the next three weeks, we can find some positive solutions on how to move forward.
“I wish them well,” Parker added.
The commission was established after San Diego voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure more than four years ago calling for stricter oversight of the San Diego Police Department. Measure B received almost 75 percent of more than 600,000 votes in November 2020.
Despite the broad support, the effort to establish the commission was slow to take root.
Once the model was approved by the San Diego City Council, it took months and years to find volunteer members and agree on management and oversight practices.
When Parker was named executive director earlier this year, city officials were confident they had their leader and predicted effective civilian oversight of the police department was at hand.
“Public safety is truly a partnership,” Councilmember Marni von Wilpert, who spearheaded the nationwide search that resulted in Parker’s hiring, said at the time. “Public safety is stronger when that relationship between SDPD and the public is stronger.”
The resignation came as a disappointment to Andrea St. Julian, the co-chair of the San Diegans for Justice advocacy group who spent years developing the commission after Measure B passed.
“The City Council and the CPP made a wise decision when (they) appointed Paul Parker as the executive director,” she said. “In his short time at the CPP, he has moved the organization forward in terms of building a structural base.
“It saddens me to see Paul leave, but I fully believe that the council and the commission will be able to find a new executive director who is just as competent and dedicated as Paul,” St. Julian added.
Parker, who is 54, spent 10 years with the Youngtown Police Department in Arizona before joining the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s Office in 1999.
He returned to the Grand Canyon State in 2010 for a series of jobs in forensic pathology and rejoined the San Diego County payroll in 2017 to take over as executive officer of the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board.
He later accepted a job as a chief deputy director at the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office but was lured back to San Diego County to run the civilian oversight board again in 2020.
In his second stint at the board known as CLERB, Parker negotiated the right to visit death scenes in cases destined for review by the county oversight body.
He also issued a series of policy recommendations to Sheriff Kelly A. Martinez and Chief Probation Officer Tamika Nelson, many of which were rejected or met with slow responses, according to a recent study released by CLERB.
In March, Parker quit the county board, saying he could no longer serve while its recommendations were overlooked and while his push for expanded jurisdiction went nowhere with the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.
“It seemed like I was talking to myself,” he said later. “I was banging my head against the wall.”
However, one of the key recommended reforms Parker had repeatedly sought from supervisors was officially adopted by the elected officials just this week. County supervisors voted to expand the CLERB authority to include jail medical staff and contractors in death investigations.
Parker is not the only top official from the San Diego Commission on Police Practices to resign in recent days. The panel’s lawyer, Duane Bennett, announced his departure late last month and will leave the board on Dec. 31.